I've lived a life of madness and mayhem. I’ve had diabetes for 50 years and have been addicted to one substance of another for 45 of those years. It has been a beautifully joyful and painful schizophrenic ride: drugs, booze, women, music, writing, and learning with each new success or defeat. This blog tries to come to grips with all of life's fractures and contains everything--even you.

About Me

I've recently published my memoir, JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC, on Smashwords. The link to that and an accompanying interview can be gotten to at:
http://smashwords.com/books/view/715

Monday, February 6, 2017

A LONG POEM FOR SHORT-TERM MEMORIES

Strength tests
for a blubbery country
its body grown old
fat & full & sloppy
from corn syrup
& sedimentation;
muscles dripping,
arteries slogging,
reflexis dull
& slow and full
of shit.
The light,
if ever there was some,
is a brackish yellow seepage,
it flickers and burns
out. It happens
to all of us: those who dine
on caviar & gherkins,
or those who spooned Mulligans Stew.
It happens to University profs
with their dainty organic salads
and long-distance truckers
sucking down Big Macs & Red Bulls.
We've been content
to have let ourselves go
and segment ourselves for the sellers:
pilferages seven days a week;
footballbasketballbaseball non-stop,
homeshopping, mafia housewives, LA Hair, lock-ups
of the toothless and hopeless and helpless; penny-ante pilferages
of grapes or nuts or toothpaste or toilet paper while we wait
for the weather--rain or a half inch of snow is enough to send us
into paroxysms of anxiety.
Do you need a dick pill?
A nervous pill?
A vaginal cream?
How about sugar pill?
Nosespray?
Neuropathy? Can I sell you a car that can see behind itself?
Can I help you park it? And what about those tits on that anchor woman?
Where is that handsome young man who wants to tell me about Medicare?

The fabric has weakened
as predicted it would.
It is neurosis which has flown
in a widening gyre
while the falcon
trains its eyes
on us.